Diary of a Country Pickpocket

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Yesterday saw the passing of Francesco Rosi, who made (among many others) the excellent CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, SALVATORE GIULIANO, and HANDS OVER THE CITY. Rosi leaves behind an impressive (and underseen) body of work that is an interesting marriage of neorealism and New Wave sensibilities. I hope his passing renews interest in his work.

Below is an appreciation I wrote of his 1965 bullfighting saga, THE MOMENT OF TRUTH (which contains an unfortunate STAR WARS analogy but please look past that).

* * *

Francesco Rosi’s THE MOMENT OF TRUTH is a blood-soaked poem observing (if not totally celebrating)
the gory pageantry of the bullfighting circuit.

The film begins with an
extended, dialogue-less trek through a religious festival in a Spanish city. Onlookers
line the street while Catholic acolytes in Klan-like capirotes lumber through clouds of incense, holding grotesque statues of
Jesus and the Virgin.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

"As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought the child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the leaves of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.

The ancient poetWho pitied monkeys for their cries,What would he say, if he sawThis child crying in the autumn wind?

How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child's undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive -- by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind."

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

(Note: this for a fiction writing competition I participated in and only serves obligations related to it. Posts should resume here in the fall. It's been a very busy summer. Cheers.)

“Of course they melted,” Sean Pratchett thought to himself. “What was I thinking?”

The last of the runners made their way across the finish line, the heavy salt air absorbing the sound of the pok-pok-pok of their thin-soled shoes slapping against the asphalt.

Nearly six hours had passed while Sean sat in the canvas folding chair he’d borrowed from one of the race administrators. Six hours of scanning the thousands of runners as they broke through their miles of monotony, finally finding rest under the creaking redwoods of Carmel.

While he sat, the Whitman’s Sampler box had balanced on his lap. The heat from his body had slowly turned the contents into a gritty, sticky ooze which now seeped onto his worn khaki Capri pants, leaving a faint brown square.

“Another failure?” His mind hesitated. Surely he’d missed her. He wouldn’t have missed her, right? She would be twenty-two now. The last time she had seen him, she had been a mere ten years old. But he had a good idea of what she looked like now.

Through access to free library computers and myriad pseudonymous email and social media accounts, he’d been able to superficially piece together her progress through adolescence, young adulthood, and college. His amateur sleuthing had brought him here.

“Lorelei Anne Pratchett will be celebrating her recent graduation with honors by running the Big Sur Marathon,” the alumni bulletin had read. “After that, Pratchett hopes to study for her Master’s at...”

He’d forgotten the rest because it involved high-minded aspirations in far-flung places. Pride in accomplishment – his own or his daughter’s – had never been a vice he’d grappled with.

“Another failure,” Sean concluded, dropping the withering chocolates into one of the temporary trash barrels. “How could I have ever worked up the nerve to give them to her anyway?”

The late April morning had started with a vibrant, tickly energy on the fierce headwind. The drum circle had beat loud and the local arts coalition had assembled a group of shaggy folks to enact a twisting, arrhythmic dance at the outer fringe of the finish line, past the reporters’ trucks and near the patron-choked cafes and restaurants. The dancers sang blessings to the emergent victors, hanging medals around necks. When the medals ran out, daisy chains were employed. When these disappeared, hugs were freely given. When the dancers’ cosmic mission took them elsewhere – either beach or bed or brunch – the straggling runners were left to the devices of friends and family.

The crowd’s applause was softer and more obligatory now, coming in faint clusters delivered by spectators cradling their phones between their ears and shoulders. All but twenty-six of the runners were accounted for.

Sean stretched and shook out his limbs, his mind beginning to wander to practical concerns: where he’d sleep tonight and who with (a few of the lady dancers had been favorable); how to score a little hash for the road and, speaking of that, how he’d get back to Los Angeles in time for work Monday. He lit a cigarette.

In the distance, a tall female form limped with the help of one of the race’s volunteer EMTs. Lorelei, if he wasn’t mistaken. A few steps forward revealed he wasn’t. The sudden realization made his palms go limp and wet.

When he occasionally admitted to having had a family, whether in a mess of drunken warm feeling or because of some official document, the admission would shock and scare him. Thinking about it too long was like staring into the flame of a welding torch. He feared blindness from prolonged exposure.

Her gait was unbalanced, weakened. There was in it the same cautious shuffle he remembered from two decades ago, when she’d navigated the living room carpet for the first time. In her wincing – audible now as she closed the distance between them – he heard strains of the slow rising wail that signified a nightmare, the one that meant he or Ruth would be sprinting down the hall to murmur reassurances. It’s all just a dream, dear.

Sean’s mind flickered to the nightmare that hadn’t been a dream: Too many drinks, too few people looking out for him. A minivan in his headlights arriving way too fast. The realization that he’d crossed the double yellow lines occurring to him way too late. A family of five dead. A sentence served. A family of three lost.

“They’re better off without me,” he would say when asked about it, adopting a benevolent wistfulness. “They’re happy now. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.”

Sean’s friends knew him as the wry one, the one who could deliver the gallows punch lines. They didn't know about Lorelei or the minivan. He didn't remain friends with the ones who found out.

“Demons took me for a test drive but they decided they’d keep shopping around,” was his favorite woe-is-me, delivered in the gentle mocking tone he’d affected for so long that he couldn't remember his original melody anymore.

She was limping mere yards away from him now. Their eyes met without the flash of recognition he’d been terrified of. She was beautiful, even in her pallid distress. She limped past, the EMT murmuring reassurances. “You’ll be fine,” Sean heard him say. “You’re lucky though.”

Sean remembered reading about hyponatremia, the potentially deadly state of overhydration that affects some runners. Too little salt in their blood. He wondered if this had happened to her. He thought of his own bland, watered-down life and then felt – for an ecstatic moment that was instantly gone – a moment of pride. She’d run. She’d tried. She was here. She’d be fine.

“God is awful yet kind,” he said to himself, realizing that it wasn't his own thought. It was from a book or a movie or song or something he’d encountered long ago. He began walking south with half a mind to stick out his thumb, allowing the headwind to propel him homeward.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

And we're off! I'll be updating the roster below throughout the day and
then add some closing thoughts. [UPDATE 6/2/14: thoughts have been closed, pull quotes have been added. See below.]

Since I'm hosting this year, I'm going
to delay posting my own entry until tomorrow so as not to steal the
thunder of the other contributors. Speaking of which:- Anna Maurya keeps on moving with Francis Ford Coppola's TWIXT!"... strange small town called Swann Valley, the kind of place that gets its own narrated introduction by Tom Waits (no really!)."- Jason Alley pays a visit to FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION!"The first scene in the movie to make me sit up and go 'Whoa, what the
hell IS THIS?' involves a door, a shard of glass, the color blue, and
some very dramatic makeup..."

- Dennis Cozzalio hangs with the BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH!"But then there’s a murderous deputy
with a hairbrush mustache that would put Wilford Brimley to shame, the wild-eyed
local Grand Wizard, who just happens to be the town district attorney—his post-raid
speech to the faithful must have had Charles Laughton frantically trying to
reach his lawyers from beyond the grave— and various uniformed and sheeted minions
of terror who exist mainly to get blown up real good."

- Paul Clark makes THE PERFECT GETAWAY!"They're the kind of couple one sometimes meets while traveling- almost
oppressively friendly, somewhat clingy, full of tales and prone to
showing off."- Heather Seebach keeps an eye on THE BABY! "What
follows is a battle between Ann and the Wadsworth family for custody of
Baby. By battle, I don't mean courtroom drama but a ridiculous sequence
of events involving a swinging 70s party (for a toddler) and an
attempted kidnapping/murder, followed by actual kidnapping and murder."- Stacia Kissick Jones endures THE DUNWICH HORROR!"'What
if we decided to really dig deep into the whole courtship part of
Rosemary’s Baby, and also include some almost nudity?' is what someone
surely said at some point during pre-production."

- Christianne Benedict heralds the RETURN OF THE KILLER TOMATOES!"Oh, yeah. George Clooney. He's in this. I wonder if he still puts it on his CV, not that George Clooney needs a CV anymore."

- David Blakeslee sheds a little POST TENEBRAS LUX!"... an artist has every reason to expect that his heartfelt expressions
will be written off as trivial wankery if he persists in hewing so close
to his personal experience as the source of his material. That’s
especially true if he has yet to give the general public little reason
to be curious about his autobiography."

- Bill Ryan's entry is rated WebC-17 for FULL FRONTAL Soderbergh!"The fact that she has control over the situation after having been debased is made plausible by Duchovny not
being ostentatious with his character's guilt, and by McCormack not
screaming her throat raw. She's suddenly the disappointed adult."

- Michael May has a eur-EEGAH moment!"I've pretty much continued to foist terrible films on other people (this year it was 1981's TARZAN THE APE MAN starring Bo Derek), but I'll probably change that next year. EEEGAH has taught me a lesson."

- Kenji Fujishima whips up a batch of SATAN'S BREW!"It’s as if Fassbinder, for this one shining moment, decided to throw
everything that was occupying his mind against a wall, just to see what
resulted."

- Andrew Bemis finally opens his eyes and voraciously demands
light with a howl of rage (RED LIGHTS)!"... an ending that can't decide between Elmer Gantry-esque cynicism or wide-eyed Shyamalan-ian wonder."- Craig Phillips wonders about THE NEW KIDS!"... one of the
most entertaining and memorably sleazy group of cretinous bullies you'll
find in any high school movie ever, with several lummoxes, a slow
chubby kid, at least one creep, and the picked-on little brother (it's
never entirely clear which if any of these kids are related, but they
seem inbred even if not with each other)."- All the way from Down Under, Roderick Heath witnesses an AMERICATHON!"There is perhaps no form of bad film more troubling than the bad comedy.
... When someone makes a bad horror
film or scifi film, the viewer has the privilege of enjoying the
disparity between intent and result—they can laugh at it. Whereas bad
comedy is bad precisely because you cannot laugh at it. This failure
inspires instead a sense of personal desperation."

- Josh Bell goes UNDERGROUND with some ACES!"... manages
to be both sexist and racist, in addition to completely nonsensical
... This is the kind of movie that features two different fast-motion
montages set to 'wacky' fiddle music."- Craig Lindsey takes a spin with a GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE! "... a must for anyone who ever wanted to see Faithfull in her willowy, lip-pursing heyday ..."

- Patrick Miller feels an AFTERSHOCK! "... just tedious enough to keep it from being compellingly inept ..."

- Steven Carlson smells THE GLOVE: LETHAL TERMINATOR!"... during the fight with the butcher, there’s about a thirty-second period
where we’re left to stare at Saxon’s ass as he lays on the ground
because I presume nobody thought to get the scene from another angle."

- Recently published author Adam Nayman is one heck of a HELLROLLER! "I don’t know what movies it could be usefully compared to, but I wouldn’t want to see them in any case... this isn't just a 'low' movie; it's positively subterranean ..."

- Josh Ralske CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC! He really can't, you guys!"If the point of the White Elephant Blogathon is to stymie your fellow critics, I lose and you win, chooser of CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC."

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Once again, it's time for the White Elephant Film Blogathon. Last year, when Paul Clark asked for volunteers to take over hosting duties for the big event, I drew the short straw. So here is where we find ourselves.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Happy 2014 everyone! The above sums up the type of writing I hope to bring to this blog in the coming months. Terser, less informed, and more off-the-cuff. It's exactly on the way I would write. It's going to be a great year, "once dust settles!"

Saturday, December 7, 2013

"Money is an abominable idol. It is everywhere. The only things that matter are invisible. Why are we here? What are life and death?"

- Robert Bresson, in conversation with Michel Ciment

"(I saw) L’ARGENT, which was beyond awful. A cynical old man’s movie with every
stylistic trope that would provide perfect evidence to back the case of
all those who might claim to detest 'Art Movies.' Especially French ones."

- [NAME REDACTED], in an email to me

As previously documented, Robert Bresson is -- if I must choose only one -- my favorite director. Mainly, I think he's the one who has the most to teach anyone who wants to use moving images to tell stories. Over the course of his career, he whittled filmmaking down to its most basic (and deceptively simple) elements. While I think A MAN ESCAPED is both the most representative and accessible of Bresson's films and techniques, Bresson's swansong -- 1983's L'ARGENT -- may just be the apotheosis of his style. In fact, as my friend argued above, a case can be made for L'ARGENT being close to a Bressonian self-parody. While a plausible case for this can be mounted, I heartily disagree.